Video 5:51
Delia Lawrie

Transcript

LAETITIA LEMKE, PRESENTER: The Northern Territory Treasurer joins us to talk about the budget, Delia Lawrie welcome to the program.

DELIA LAWRIE, TREASURER: Good evening Laetitia.

LAETITIA LEMKE: The Country Liberal Leader Terry Mills has described this as a budget of deficit, debt and deceit. 387 million dollars of debt and no surplus date in sight, have you been as tough as you needed to be?

DELIA LAWRIE: It was a very tight budget. We've got restrictions across the public service, we are tightening our belt. We are saving about 81.5 million dollars through tightening our belt tightening, efficiency dividends, staffing cap but the reality of the economic cycle is we're still post Global Financial Crisis in recovery, the public spend has to be high to support jobs, this budget is about keeping Territorians in a job.

LAETITIA LEMKE: The size of the committment for non-essential developments is substantial though, there's 155 million dollars for recreation and culture.

DELIA LAWRIE: Look recreation and culture is actually part of the great Territory lifestyle. If you look at where the bulk of that spending is going, it's going into Palmerston. Palmerston has the highest population growth so it's actually right to build them.

LAETITIA LEMKE: You have said there's no pork barrelling in this budget but there is the 12.6 million dollars for the water park, which includes the six lane super racer and 10,000 dollar grants that aren't limited to first-home buyers and aren't means tested; it does look like an election budget.

DELIA LAWRIE: Not at all, it's actually far from an election budget. If it was an election budget I would have used this budget to hold back spending to squirrel away the dollars so I can bounce out next year in an election year with a big spend budget.

LAETITIA LEMKE: The infrastructure spend is significant; you've said over 1.5 billion dollars. Over the last three years there's been more than four billion dollars that the government's put into prop up this sector citing a drying up of private sector spending, how sustainable is that?

DELIA LAWRIE: Look it is the right cycle to have dramatically high, record high significant infrastructure spends. Governments right around Australia are doing it to keep, maintain growth in their economy, to support the construction sector while we wait for the credit market start to ease up, we'll start to see a return of private sector investment in 2012 is what I'm predicting and you'll start to see an ease down in that high public sector infrastructure spend across the four years.

LAETITIA LEMKE: In terms of health, there is a record spend for health and you've got the new hospital earmarked for Palmerston, a new clinic for the Northern Suburbs. Are you confident that the capacity's there to fund and staff those facilities into the future?

DELIA LAWRIE: Look the great thing we do is we keep our wages competitive so in terms of nurses and doctors obviously, you have to be competitive with what those wages are interstate. There's a significant spend in budget 2011 in terms of the wages for the health professionals to keep us competitive so we can attract them here but we're also starting to grow our own grate.

LAETITIA LEMKE: The aeromedical service, there hasn't been any money allocated for that. You still have to select a provider, where will the money for that come from?

DELIA LAWRIE: Look we've had a liability, a contingent liability that we've set aside. We have a good idea of how much that aeromed tender is likely to come in at, obviously we're not out there saying what it is because it's a competitive tender environment at the moment with a probity order across it. We've got funding in the central holding authority.

LAETITIA LEMKE: Reports in recent years point to serious disfunction in the Education Department, in Health and yet again savings are coming from the public service. Won't these restrictions just make things worse?

DELIA LAWRIE: Well both the health and education budgets are record budgets this year so in Budget 2011 the health budget has stepped up to 1.15 billion dollars, education's now stepped up to 930 million dollars.

LAETITIA LEMKE: The CPSU says that the department is haemorrhaging staff though and they're saying what you're doing now is asking them to do more with less. Won't that put more pressure?

DELIA LAWRIE: Look I've no doubt that the union got to go out there and lobby and say to the Government spend more, spend more on the public service because they're our members. What we have done is be responsible.

LAETITIA LEMKE: The budget is vague about when it is that will return to surplus, do you have any date that you could give us?

DELIA LAWRIE: The budget's never vague, they're a set of figures that are estimates, they're very clear. We target our estimates based on what our spend is, what the requirements and need is, what the revenue levels are there's nothing vague about a budget but they are estimates. What we've done is put conservative levels of GST revenue into the forward estimates because the Federal Government broke down the GST pool by 2.1 billion dollars in the 10/11 year. If there is a healthy recovery in consumption, the GST recovery in consumption, we'll improve the outer years but at this stage we have to go on the figures we're seeing in the writedowns in the GST, it would be imprudent to do otherwise.

LAETITIA LEMKE: Could you give us a year say 2016, 2017 we'd be seeing a surplus?

DELIA LAWRIE: What you do do is you say okay across the estimates, you do your financial year and you do a 3 year out prediction, that's the sensible and responsible thing, that's what all treasurers do with their budgets so we're having a step down at a deficit in the final year of 14/15 in the budget books, it's a very modest deficit of 195 million. Now clearly there a few things that can change to affect those figures in the next few years; consumption recovery occurs the GST pool goes up our revenue goes back up. We're on the cusp of a significant economic boom here in the Territory; final investment decision of the INPEX-IXIS project is expected in the last quarter of the calender year, now if there is final investment decision and there's obviously a great prospect of that in terms of the health of that project that will have a significant economic impact and will affect our budget figures going forward, but you can't factor that in because they haven't made final investment decision.